Could-ism and may-ism

Could-isms

Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies can potentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war could be pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict could be over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, soft- ware, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict could be unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization could be over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potential could involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .

States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X22002255 (my bolds)

Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”

May-isms

Intuitively, stronger interactions between systems may be expected to increase the numbers of drivers of any one system, change driver behaviour and generate more system noise. As a result, we would anticipate that higher levels of stress, more drivers and noise may bring forward threshold-dependent changes more quickly. For any particular system (for example, the Amazon forest) it is possible to envisage a time sequence that starts with one main driver (for example, deforestation), then multiple drivers (for example, deforestation plus global warming), more noise through extreme events (for example, more droughts and wildfires), with additional feedback mechanisms that enhance the drivers (for example, diminished internal water cycle and more severe droughts). A vortex could therefore emerge, with drivers generating noisier systems as climate variability and the incidence of extreme events increases.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01157-x (my bolds)

Yes, that may, might, could happen. Or not.

Upshot

The only way “could or may” leads to “must” would mean that each article and like ones began with “must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to the could-events and might-be’s.